November 2, 2010

Palin's Sunday performance was instructive. This was the show in which she said that the CBS affiliate in Anchorage, KTVA, is staffed by "corrupt bastards." This demure protest from the Evita of the North was a response to a tape in which the station's staffers were overheard saying they would look for a child molester at a campaign stop for senatorial candidate Joe Miller, whom Palin endorsed. "You know that of all the people that will show up tonight, at least one of them will be a registered sex offender," one of the staffers said. Case closed.

But hold on. How do you find a sex offender in a crowd? Do you go from person to person asking, "S'cuse me, but are you a sex offender?" Because if that is not done, then I can't see how you can ever find one. Do sex offenders wear special uniforms? No. It's obvious then that these staffers were joking - playing into the Palin stereotype of them as liberal hacks who would do anything to destroy her. This is what she believes and she recited the story with such obvious conviction that when she ended with the "corrupt bastards" tag, it seemed downright appropriate.

The fierce stupidity of this woman is hard to comprehend. It is the well from which she draws her political sustenance. It explains why she did not pause to wonder about the tape and the sheer impracticality of finding a sex offender in a crowd. This sincerity, uncomplicated by any sophistication whatsoever, is what fuels her considerable charisma. The fact that KTVA is only a CBS affiliate and the staffers not CBS employees did not give Palin pause. To her, this was Katie Couric's CBS, the network she thinks so unfairly skewered her by asking, for instance, what newspapers she reads. It's all a seamless conspiracy of them - they and them and those and them and all those elites who . . . she'll show 'em.